Staticfree Blog

Singing computers rule.

So much so that I decided the lojban text-to-speech that I'm working on needed to be able to sing. Well, it turns out that festival 1.4.3 has a cute little .scm file that lets you create XML files marked up with musical notes and durations for singing. With a little bit of poking around, I was able to convince our lojban voice to want to sing. With a little more poking around and about an hour trying to translate, I put together: "Daisy" (as in the song HAL9000 sings when Dave kills him in 2001).

Continuing the same theme, I was pointed out this project (which I had tried first, but which failed miserably): Flinger. Some of the examples are amusing, not in their badness, but in their resemblance to the pop music's tendency to use vocal distortions on actual singers.

Also, if you've never heard them before, a geek or two put together this impressive 386dx singing computer. They even have a hard-core music video!